Effect of source decay in bioluminescence tomography: a phantom study

Recent studies in bioluminescence tomography have been mainly focusing on the ill-posedness and non-uniqueness nature of the problem. In this paper, we demonstrate the significance of the effect of bioluminescence source decay on the reconstruction results with both simulations and phantom studies. Time variation of the bioluminescence source can cause artifacts in the tomographic images. The results show that source dynamic information is pivotal for accurate reconstruction when the decay half-life is comparable to the duration of the data acquisition.